Steven Maijoor, ESMA Chair, delivered the keynote speech at EFAMA's Investment Management Forum in Brussels. His speech focused on the regulatory challenges ahead for the asset management sector.
"It is very good to be back again at this important event. Before coming here today I had the chance to surf the EFAMA website and it struck me that your website is as overrun as ESMA’s website is with the many well-known European acronyms that have become part of our standard vocabulary in financial markets. This observation also made it clear to me that the topics that keep both our organisations busy are very similar.
Given the current activities of ESMA, you probably expect me to structure my contribution according to these acronyms and inform you on all of our current regulatory work that is relevant for the asset management sector. However, I would like to start first with an economic perspective on asset management, but let me assure you that later in my contribution I will not disappoint you and will refer to AIFMD, MIFID, UCITS and PRIIPs."

Steven Maijoor, ESMA Chair, spoke at the joint EU Commission/Italian Presidency Growth for Finance Conference in Brussels -
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Excerpts
"Following its launch by President Juncker in July 2014, the Capital Markets Union (CMU) is now a concept under construction and I am very happy to have been invited to contribute today to its development. When doing so, we should remember the clear objective from President Juncker who stated that the CMU should maximise the benefits of capital markets and non-bank financial institutions for the real economy.
"Despite the many efforts of the past four decades, and the good results achieved, the EU capital market is still fragmented which limits its potential. For example, an institutional investor wanting to invest in a mid-sized company will still have a strong bias towards companies in its own Member-State. There are transactions not happening that otherwise would be beneficial both for the investor and the company because of this home bias. The reason for this stems from a complex set of barriers relating to such issues as transparency of Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs), differences in their governance and cross-border differences in the ownership of shares. In sum, we are only halfway there. While the EU capital market has integrated steadily in the past four decades it is not yet comparable with, for example, the US capital market.
With a five year time-horizon in mind, what is needed to achieve a strong and integrated capital market to increase capital availability and to support economic growth in all 28 Member States? In my view, there are four main building blocks:
(1) greater diversity in funding;
(2) increasing the efficiency of capital markets;
(3) strengthening and harmonisation of supervision; and
(4) increasing the attractiveness of capital markets both for EU investors and for investors from outside the Union.
"The CMU should be based on an accelerated integration of the capital markets of the 28 Member States. The end goal should be a CMU that is competitive, efficient and that provides a wide range of funding channels. Above all, it should be trusted by investors."